Congressional Power - Domestic politics and congressional power

The unusual breakdown of Congress played a critical role in the early
stages of the Cold War. With a shaky base of congressional support, Truman
had little choice but to work with internationalist Republicans: more than
flattery was at stake in Dean Acheson's attempts to woo Vandenberg
and his ideological comrades, Henry Cabot Lodge II and H. Alexander Smith.
The temperaments, ideologies, and inclinations of the internationalist
Republicans made them players on virtually every foreign policy issue of
the day. Their performance set the stage for a new way for Congress to
exert influence: with the foreign policy powers of the federal government
expanding at an exponential rate, members of Congress could maneuver
through the resulting chaos.

From a completely different ideological perspective, other domestic forces
also encouraged a congressional presence in the early Cold War. Following
the elections of 1946, when Republicans captured control of both houses of
Congress, more than half of the House GOP caucus petitioned for membership
in the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). One of these
freshmen, California congressman Richard Nixon, made a national name for
himself with his activities on the committee, especially after he exposed
perjury by the former State Department official Alger Hiss. With the
committee championing the anticommunist cause in the House, Republican
Joseph McCarthy took up the banner in the Senate. The Wisconsin senator
was the rare member of Congress who could shape the national psyche, and
both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations had to deal with the
consequences of his actions. In the process, while the liberal
internationalist and Asia-first alternatives that Congress considered
during the early portions of Truman's years fell by the wayside,
the nationalists in Congress flourished.

Even during the height of his power, McCarthy sponsored no important laws;
he sought to affect the national debate on anticommunism but eschewed the
hard work necessary to pass legislation. Measured by that standard, the
most influential member of the postwar Congress was Nevada senator Pat
McCarran, who was responsible for two critical pieces of Cold War
legislation: the McCarran Internal Security Act (1950) and the
McCarran-Walter Immigration Act (1952). McCarran's position as a
Democrat willing to buck his party's leadership and his
considerable contacts with the Federal Bureau of Investigation gave him
clout on Capitol Hill. In addition, the ability of figures like McCarran
to work around the traditional congressional structure to have an
impact—the senator's power base was the Judiciary
Committee—provided a model for future congressional initiatives
that challenged executive control.

In the years following Truman's decision to commit forces to the
Korean conflict, Congress's role in warmaking notably declined,
while the growth of executive agreements produced a similar diminution of
the Senate's treaty-making power. These developments did not escape
congressional notice. During the Truman administration, a group of
nationalists led by Ohio's two GOP senators, John Bricker and
Robert Taft, embraced the cause of congressional power. The duo argued
that Truman-style internationalism would not be possible if Congress took
its appropriate place as a partner of the executive on foreign policy
matters.

With the election of Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952, liberal
Democrats searched for a way to use congressional power to criticize the
president without being labeled soft on communism. They urged a formal,
symbolic role in framing policy, with the executive conceding the
principle of legislative input in exchange for Congress allowing the
president freedom of action to prosecute the Cold War. Hubert Humphrey (a
member of the populist Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota)
candidly described this stance as a "limited dissent."
Indeed, as practiced in the Eisenhower administration, it actually came to
less than that: Eisenhower pioneered the tactic—later made famous
with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution—of submitting blank-check
resolutions authorizing vaguely defined overseas actions. The relationship
between Eisenhower and congressional Democrats suggested that genuine
collaboration interested neither side.

But in many ways, a focus on the balance of power between Congress and the
president misses the most important element in the legislative response to
the early Cold War. That instead came in an internal congressional
development: the creation of the culture of a Cold War Congress. The
position of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee weakened as the
international issues (warmaking and approving treaties) over which it had
clear jurisdiction fell into disuse. Within Congress, the committee came
under challenge from the newly created Joint Committee on Atomic Energy
and the Senate Armed Services Committee, which both proved less than
zealous in challenging executive policies. With the expansion of the
defense budget, influence especially shifted to the Armed Services
Committee, which viewed itself less as an oversight body than as a
defender of the Pentagon and as a gatherer of defense contracts for
members' congressional districts. Other aspects of the national
security state, especially the intelligence community, similarly stood
beyond congressional control.